A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of "Licence en Langue et Littérature Anglaises".

RESUME,

The present study aims to respond to the following questions:What is the state of academic vocabulary among English majors at the university of Burundi-BAC3 students ?Does the teaching of words from the AWL lead to their retention and use?Where do the other words used in BAC 3 students' essays come from in terms of frequency?
To this end ,an analysis of all the essay compositions done by the BAC3 students from university of Burundi-English Language and Literature Department during the academic year 2014-2015 has been done.The same students did the said essays before and after the teaching of AWL.The analysis was conducted student-by-student to respond to two first questions using the online tool called Lextutor.It is actually accessible for free at the following link:http:www.lextutor.ca/.The result has shown that basing on the findings from the AWL contributed towards improvement though it is not very significant.Before the course the number of students who used 10% of academic vocabularies was rated to 0.87% (i.e .2 students out of 299 used the required academic vocabularies,it was rated to 56.3% (i.e.129 out of 229 students) before the course but it moved from 56.3% to 57.3% (129 out 225 students).
Thus,the teaching of AWL lead to their retention and use although the expectation was high and the results show cleary that it is (1001-2000),and off list -words.Thus,the most frequency words vary from i word band up to 2000 word-bands in significant.
A sample of hundred and fifty essays was also selected randomly to be analyzed to respond to the last question of the current study.Worthy to inform that the same BAC3 students from university of Burundi-English Language and literature wrote the essay compositions.Results of the study show that apart from AWL,BAC3 students from University of Burundi were able to use other word-bands including K1-words (1-1000),k2-words